Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Note:every week, news aggregators address hundreds of worthwhile stories or opinions that never catch on, either because they lack an obvious follow-up or because sites that live off ad revenue would rather bang high-traffic drums over and over. Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo provides a summary of good stuff you might have missed. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. He has not eaten anyone since 1980.

That's not all. Pawlenty proposes a flat tax rate of 10% for everybody earning under $100,000 and 25% for everybody earning above that. He claims these tax cuts for the wealthy on an unprecedented scale would lead to 5% growth of the economy over ten years — despite the fact that 5% growth of the economy over ten years has never been done. Ever. Do you care about him yet? Really—no? You're still doing that thing where you stand alone in your driveway shooting free throws and saying to yourself, "If this goes in, it means that Melissa likes me"? Jeez—uh, okay, how about this: he casually mentions a "Google Test" that says if you can find a service being offered by the internet, it should be done by private industry and not government. Some astute people observe that this covers "everything ever."

That Pawlenty is thoroughly unexciting despite his best attempts has been satirized on The Daily Show and Colbert Report for the past few months. However, the media's portrait of him as a non-entity because of his boringness rather than as the sort of person who can destroy the social composition of America via his radical views allows the Republican narrative to slip even further to the right without consequence, so you probably should care about him.• Speaking of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the White House's chief economic advisor Austan Goolsbee has retired from what must be the most frustrating job in the world. Goolsbee appeared multiple times on bothprograms, appearing more exasperated with each subsequent appearance. His last appearance on The Colbert Report, three weeks before his departure, contained a subtle aura of immense bewilderment at how absolutely nothing has changed. Imagine the stagnation that has to set in to get you to abandon selling Obama product to the Daily Show audience, which is like selling charismatic Christianity to southern Baptists who like clapping. We wish him happiness with his future endeavors, which will presumably involve him not visibly struggling to keep a straight face parroting the White House's years-old but unchanging line, "Things are going to be rough for a while but are slowly getting better, due to compromised non-corrective acts dwarfed by the scope of the Second Great Depression."

• The conservative think tank Club for Growth has recently expressed some concerns about Mitt Romney's controversially unprincipled Republican way of life. Club for Growth leader Chris Chocula Chocola posited that the Television President candidate opposes "pro-growth tax code reform," which really means he's doubtful Romney will create an economic environment that would allow money to be funneled into their bank accounts so fast it'd burn out high-end monitors to watch the numbers in real time. This sounds flippant until you consider Chris Chocola's entire purpose in life is to watch a billion dollars move from the middle class to the upper class while cackling, "One thousand million! Ah! Ah! Ah!" then repeat.

• The Cleveland Clinic finds that serving trauma victims in poor neighborhoods isn't profitable, so they're closing their hospital in East Cleveland. The city is considering suing, offering a fantastic reminder that leaving public services in the hands of private industry that profits from not delivering those services is fucking stupid and unconscionable.

• A week after the Ohio legislature passed a set of bills that would allow citizens to carry guns into bars, three people were shot in a club in downtown Cleveland. I'm sure they're fine. They can just palm-slap great spankings of their own gushing blood on the locked doors of some kind of healthcare facility.

• The National Republican Congressional Committee is furious that Betty Sutton (D-OH) accepted money from Anthony Weiner in April 2010, and demanded that she donate it to charity. She did, and gave it to a local veterans' organization. After Sutton issued the press release about donating the money to charity, the Ohio Republican Party issued its own press release demanding that she donate the money to charity because keeping it condones Weiner's behavior. Never let a good press release go to waste.

• Paul Ryan asks his constituents to read Ayn Rand. Catholics who actually know their faith plead with Paul Ryan to read the Bible instead, because slashing services for the poor is not what Jesus would do. Paul Ryan argues that, if there were a God, his head wouldn't be shaped like that. Catholics reply that Paul Ryan's head is proof of a just God.

• Through the Christian Science Monitor, we can trace the evolution of far-right ideas in the country's political narrative, driven by the media. On June 14, they ran a story titled, "Ethanol vote: First step toward extinction for federal tax subsidies?" — which is a bit baseless but otherwise fair title. However, note the opening of the second paragraph:

The vote also opened a rare rift in GOP ranks on the question of what constitutes a tax increase.

"Ending a tax break or a tax subsidy" is a "tax increase" in much the same way that "missing an opportunity to let a car merge" is "literally murdering and exsanguinating the driver behind you," so it's great to see the Koch brothers and Club For Growth promoting the idea of ending all these ethanol subsidies: it's one of the rare instances where conservatives and liberals agree. It's certain they'll get behind what's best for the country if oil companies' tax breaks are ever laid out on the slaughtering table, with the "this is a tax increase!" talking point nowhere to be seen. Be sure to hold Tom Coburn accountable, as well, who states in the first article by the CSM that "Taxpayers should be encouraged that Republican senators overwhelmingly rejected the ludicrous argument that eliminating tax earmarks is a tax increase." Keep up that good fight, Tom!

• Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has set the bar so low that his removing a painting called "Wishes in the Wind" from the governor's mansion counts as merely conventionally shallow. The painting depicts three children playing with bubbles, each child representing a real case the artist personally researched. All three kids were poor. One was homeless; another had his father and brother killed by a drunk driver. The governor argues that he's super-pumped about the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, so he's redoing the entire floor in memory of that, and says more people will see it in some library or museum than his mansion, anyway. However, the artist is unsatisfied with this explanation:

"The homeless, central city children and victims of drunk drivers normally do not have a voice in politics," Lenz explained in an email. "This painting was an opportunity for future governors to look these three children in the eye, and I hope, contemplate how their public policies might affect them and other children like them."

The museum or library in which the painting might be housed will be lucky to have enough funding to even exist by the time the governor's term expires. Then again, based on Walker's policies, those three children in the painting likely won't exist either, so it's probably a null issue to him anyway.

• Bruce Bartlett joins the ranks of kinda-sorta-well-known economists raising his hands futilely toward the heavens in frustration over conservatives stifling discussions about economics that are grounded in reality. He notes that the country's taxes are indeed at a record low. He even takes the trouble to debunk the GOP backup talking point that they're not at a historic low as a percentage of GDP, something which should be irrelevant anyway. What makes this special is that Bruce Bartlett served an important role in the Reagan administration. You can sense the well-founded exasperation of the editor for the New York Times' "Economix" section that we're still not having an adult conversation about this, simply by comparing Bartlett's introduction from one week to the next:

May 31, 2011: Bruce Bartlett has served as an economic adviser in the White House, the Treasury Department and Congress.

June 7, 2011: Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.

This guy isn't just some dime-a-dozen liberal crank plucked by the NYT, he was in the goddamn Reagan administration and worked for Ron fucking Paul, who wants to eliminate the income tax. When this guy says we're not having an honest and adult conversation about tax rates, it deserves some attention. Sorry, Economix editor, but it won't get any. Conversations about how radically far-right the country has moved in such a shockingly small span of time are relegated to a roughly bi-weekly column in the Washington Post, Paul Krugman a few times a week and FireDogLake.

• To ensure you, the reader, are up-to-date on information presented here, a follow-up: remember how New York's Attorney General was so disgusted with a mega-half-assed study that was supposed to investigate the dangers of fracking that he filed a lawsuit against the state's regulators? Apparently, nobody bothered to check if that was cool with the state's Democratic Governor, Andrew Cuomo, as he's now seeking to lift the state's moratorium on fracking. But hey, you can't place all the blame on him. The former Democratic Gov. David Paterson vetoed a bill that would have actually, formally banned the environment-wrecking profit-boosting regulation-exempt practice. He opted instead to only ban fracking until further studies were completed, leaving plenty of time for industry lobbyists to educate regulators on complex matters like wads of cash and what it means to take a biracial stripper "around the world."

• But then again, fracking might not be as profitable as we've been led to believe, according to some industry insiders. The New York Times has released hundreds of internal documents and emails detailing skepticism about multiple aspects related to fracking, including profitability and production capability per well. This might sound kind of like a big deal, but if it's true, it's actually a really big deal. Words like "Ponzi scheme" are being thrown around. A geologist who used to work at a major energy company compared the current public operations vs. the behind-the-scenes reality to that of Enron's. You can read tons more fun things in both the linked article and the emails linked from the article itself — lots of stuff like "bubble" and "inherently unprofitable" and "reminds you of dot-coms" and "big problem" and "profound consequences." You know, existentially damning things like that, for both the economics of the practice and the environment. But that probably doesn't sell papers, so, hey! Look over there! Debt ceiling! Class warfare! Culture clash!

While this might sound like great news to anybody who likes the existence of vegetation or potable water, it's important to address a historical context when it comes to gigantic corporations and following through on something in which they've invested a lot of resources, no matter how evil and stupid they discover it to be after they've already committed to it. For instance, the financial reform bill left the Credit Default Swap market completely unhindered, and banks are going right back to putting their hand on that hot stove with the knowledge that they'll get rewarded with billions of dollars for their troubles, and citizens who had no part in the crisis will bear the entirety of the pain.

So while natural gas companies probably can't justify a bailout, it turns out there's a bit of a slapfight between T. Boone Pickens and the Koch Brothers on whether natural gas companies should receive subsidies for developing vehicles that run off their product. Even if natural gas companies lose that battle of the billionaires, they've got a President in office encouraging utility companies to switch from coal to natural gas to generate electricity, so they know they're going to be able to wrangle a profit as long as there's somebody in a position that's remotely important extolling the virtues of what they're selling. And even if it does turn out that it's not as profitable as initially portrayed, they've been sticking with natural gas extraction ever since they got fracking fluids exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act regulations in 2005, and damned if they're not gonna fight to the finish to keep their public image as one of making good decisions. That's what the socially darwinian supermen atop the free markets always do, right? That's motherfracking rational-actor theory, homes.

• Democrats are calling for changes to the country's weak energy policies, asking that the nation's leader show some responsibility. While nuclear reactors are already being closed by 2022 in response to the Fukushima station disaster, and renewable energy output requirements by 2020 have been raised to 35% from 17%, Democrats are demanding that power companies foot the bill for clean energy changes rather than consumers. They say companies already receive enough government aid, and are moving to implement a cap of 3.5 cents a kilowatt hour for a citizen's power bill attributable to infrastructure upgrades. Germany has its shit down.

In the United States, however, we've got regulators fighting tooth and nail to ensure that energy companies don't have to be compliant with jack shit. Mere months after the Fukushima disaster, which should have done more to weaken the image of nuclear power in the eyes of Americans than Homer Simpson's impression of the Slim Pickens climax to Dr. Strangelove, investigative reports have been released detailing how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has not only weakened safety margins for acceptable damage to core components of reactors, but has also helped to cover up that 48 out of 65 examined nuclear power sites are leaking radioactive materials into groundwater because the piping used to carry them is old and corroded. From a business perspective, what's better: bribing your regulators to cover up bad shit, or replacing your aging infrastructure to ensure responsible handling of ultra-dangerous materials? Mhmm. You can't bill customers for kilowatt hours of electrical service from a lethally orange glowing orb cratering into a lava bath in the middle of the earth it used to stand on. But, hey, let's hedge the controversy on this bad science!

• Not all stories of corrupt regulators working closely with the industries they're supposed to monitor have such happy endings, unless you count adventures with biracial strippers bused in on rented Greyhounds by Patton Boggs, LLP. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) worked so closely with Sunflower Electric Power Corp. that it was common practice for the KDHE to receive a public question and send it to Sunflower for a response, then passing off Sunflower's response as the board's own — if Sunflower advised the KDHE to respond at all. Hundreds of internal emails between the two have been released, confirming the cozy and shockingly close relationship which completely betrayed the entire purpose of the KDHE. The article exemplifies quality investigative journalism and contains a timeline of "convenient" events for Sunflower, comparisons of Sunflower-approved responses to public questions and KDHE's actual responses to them, quotes from several Republican state Senators who see nothing wrong with the relationship because Kansas "doesn't have mountains or oceans," and a 400+MB archive of all released correspondence.

• Driven by the constant life-affirming need to innovate, the free market, undeterred by the vanishing status of lead paint chips, has decided to double-down on its efforts to introduce the brain-damaging substance into a child's body via a different and more exciting delivery system: the air they breathe.

• The Supreme Court of the United States has made a rare good decision, an occasion made even more surprising because of its subject matter: Miranda rights and juveniles. Anthony Kennedy joined the liberal justices in proclaiming that police must consider a suspect's age when using questioning that's coercive, because in the context of this case, they're talking about little kids. You know, the smaller people who sometimes still poop their pants and have to wear elastic waistbands on their jeans and, omigod, did we mention velcro shoes? While a casual observer might call this "common sense" they lack the wisdom of Samuel Alito, who considers the notion of pondering whether or not a child understands coercive questioning to be a slippery slope to remaking Miranda altogether. Samuel Alito is Death Gelatin masquerading as a human being.

• In what's probably the most satisfyingly on-point article you might find about the current state of American politics, some guy named Drew Westen demolishes the falsehood that the Democrats even approach what can be considered "moderate," due to how conservative the party skews at this point in time. He does so without using the voice of a "far-left liberal" but rather with the terms of a moderate indistinguishable from a Rockefeller Republican. It's well-reasoned, and you should irritate your friends by making sure they come to terms with it. If they're birthers or fans of Palin and Bachmann, insist that they make it past the first page, because it's not so bad afterwards. Seriously, read it. Have you clicked the fucking link yet? Good, now send it to everybody, and send it twice to any "well, Democrats at least care about us" types.

I've said it before and I'll say it again... health care cannot be a for-profit "business". Otherwise you will ultimately end up with hospitals that will only treat healthy people and charge exorbitant fee to do so in order to maximize profit.

Also, I think many, many more environmental and privacy violations by corporations will be discovered having been perpetrated while society had it back turned dealing with the US' horrendous financial situation (the last four+ year).

Great, if not horribly depressing post. On T-Paw, I'm curious about your analysis of the extremism. Do you think he's like Mittens, an opportunist, running away from a fairly moderate record as the governor of a blue state, or do you think this primary campaign as given him cover to share his true views on government and power?

Mike, I unfortunately don't know a whole lot about Pawlenty's record as Governor. Whether or not what he's saying now reflects his true views on government and power would be dependent on whether or not he really was a moderate, or just tried to portray himself as such before going all-in with "hey guys can I be part of the Tea Party? Check out all these cool things I'm saying! Guys I'm over here, you're looking right"

When compared to Romney, though, he's definitely more gung-ho and willing to go much further to the right. IMO, he's trying to knock Bachmann out of the spotlight to get back to the status he wants, as "the viable conservative alternative to Romney." Before Bachmann entered the race, Pawlenty was seen as the most dependable runner-up to Romney, who most conservative orgs see as "not conservative enough" as evidenced by complaints from the Club For Growth. Once Bachmann entered the race with fantastic numbers and stole Pawlenty's spotlight as the conservative alternative, he doubled-down on his crazy shitheadedness.

However, before Bachmann entered the race, he was still saying shit that was pretty radically far-right, which is why I characterized his positions as alarming - in his attempt to be a Tea Party darling, despite his boring and unexciting status among actual conservatives, he was still acknowledged in the mainstream media as the runner-up. He wielded a position of influence over other candidates, who followed the leader as far right as he wanted to go during his attention grab.

Et tu, Mr. Destructo? is a politics, sports and media blog whose purpose is to tell jokes or be really right about things. All of us have real jobs and don't need the hassle that telling jokes here might occasion, which is why some contributors find it more tasteful to pretend to be dead mass murderers.